Untold Dubai Music Festival
Challenge
UNTOLD Dubai is massive: multiple stages, headliners across genres, and a site that feels more like a small city than a venue. Without barricade or backstage access, our job was to avoid the predictable “DJs and fireworks” recap and capture what the weekend actually felt like—from the first glimpse of the mainstage to the last shuttle ride home.
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“We focused on the crowd and people having fun. It was our mission.”
What we did
We approached the festival as a fully fledged creative commission, with a narrative arc shaped in advance around arrival, the energy of the crowd, the personality of each stage, standout performances, and the feeling of moving through the site. We travelled light with compact cameras and Meta Ray-Ban glasses so we could blend into the crowd and capture genuine moments without interrupting them. We kept people at the centre of the story, focusing on faces, outfits, and interactions, and we leaned into the contrast between the mainstage spectacle and the techno stage’s tighter, moodier intensity. Throughout the weekend we logged quotes and impressions on-site, so the written feature and the gallery would land as one cohesive piece rather than separate outputs.
Outcome
Over four days, we delivered a narrative feature that takes readers from Instagram discovery to the “like a rockstar” feeling of ultra VIP, then back into the heart of the crowd. Alongside it, we produced a curated gallery that balances scale and intimacy, capturing mainstage moments, techno-stage style, sponsor touchpoints, and the diverse, respectful crowd that defined the weekend. Just as importantly, the project gave us a repeatable on-the-ground approach we can now apply to festivals, launches, and large-scale events across both the UK and the UAE. Together, the story and images captured exactly what our creative director kept emphasising afterwards: just how grand, and how fun, the whole experience was.
190,000+ attendees
1 narrative feature
100+ final images
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